Today is its own brand of GOP crazy over Benghazi, but today is happening because yesterday, serious Rs and conservatives decided to take the GOP seriously about Benghazi. Over at Slate yesterday John Dickerson, who is both the editor of the website and the political news director for CBS, wrote the ubiquitous Benghazi piece. Every few months the GOP gets another batch of Emails, selectively leaks information from Issa’s hearings, or simply fabricates another insane version of events. Then, a writer like Dickerson who should be smarter than this, writes a piece talking about how there are so many questions surrounding the White House reaction to Benghazi.
Spoiler alert – there aren’t.
The problem for people like Dickerson, who take this “what did the White House do wrong,” approach about Benghazi, before clearing the White House, sort of, is that it is always predicated on a first principle. That principle, if wrong, makes almost all of their conclusions and suppositions wrong. Frankly, it usually is wrong so I generally stop reading. However, Dickerson is a serious guy, and he’s a serious political thinker, so I did him the curtsey of reading his piece. He made the same first principle mistake almost all conservative writers make about Benghazi – he writes as though the GOP is A) rational, B) acting with integrity, or C) Interested in the truth. The GOP is not rational. The GOP is not acting with integrity – nor have they been since Benghazi happen. The GOP is not interested in the truth. That simple list of facts invalidates the entire examination of Benghazi. It doesn’t just politicize it, though Mr. Romney did that hours after the event happened. It totally destroys the GOP/Conservative ability examine Benghazi. Everything they say about Benghazi is flawed, is wrong, is partisan and is delusional.
This post was republished to Critical Blackness at 4:43:50 PM 5/2/2014
Benghazi is a tragedy, not a political scandal. There was no cover up. There is no cover up. The President, and yes this White House has been way more transparent than any other in the modern history of the nation (disagree pick an administration and argue the point), was in the middle of a campaign for re-election, but no matter what Chuck Todd says, the election was never close. The campaign wasn’t in jeopardy. The GOP wasn’t close to winning. Romney’s campaign was never any closer than its final electoral vote total from victory.
The Fox moment for the Romney campaign was Benghazi. It was echo chamber and fun house mirror time. The GOP couldn’t see the forest for the trees and an incident that could have involved some very serious questions about foreign policy became a football in the mendacity of Republican talking points. It is as much a joke as Obama the Muslim, Obama’s Birth Certificate, Obama the Gay murderer, etc. It is laughable and should never be taken seriously. Especially not from people like Ayotte, McCain and Graham who are pathetic in their attempts to ring a bell about Benghazi that they know is completely false.
This all started because the GOP was trying to sell a narrative that President Obama had bungled foreign policy. The Dick and Liz show was in full effect, with former VP Dick “Chicken Hawk” Cheney, and Liz leading the Neo-Con attacks on the President’s foreign policy. Their attacks were nonsensical, racialized, and so embarrassingly inept that all they did was strengthen the President.
But if you watched Fox News, or if you listened to GOP talk radio, there was an alternative universe out there of Obama being weak, cowardly even, and incapable of running a foreign policy. The GOP senior statesmen convinced themselves of this, the same people who got us into Iraq, who assured us that they knew what they were doing, that there were weapons of mass destruction, that they were hours away from getting Bin Ladin for almost 7 years… these same people tried to convince the country that President Obama didn’t know what he was talking about. No Neocon should ever be allowed to talk foreign policy again unless accompanied by a laugh track, 70 sit-com style. The GOP is a joke. They can’t win on Jobs, unemployment is down to 6.3, even with their massive obstruction and inaction. They can’t win on foreign policy, Ukraine isn’t our war and we’re not fighting it. Afghanistan is almost over, Iraq is done, and for the first time in 14 years, the US is going to be at peace. The GOP can’t win on Foreign Policy. There is no IRS scandal. ObamaCare, their holy grail is going so well that it prevented an economic contraction in 2014. Whoops. The GOP keep tell us they are winning but they look weaker by the day. Let’s review how we got here.
Republicans win elections in three ways: Taxes, Religion, and Tough Foreign Policy. Unfortunately, for them around the time as Benghazi they realized they had nominated:
• a Mormon, effectively turning off Christian voters in places like Ohio and FL and undermining their Muslim argument
• who hadn’t actually paid any taxes at all on the hundreds of millions of dollars he’d made outsourcing hundreds of thousands of jobs – whoops,
• who had never served in the military while Obama was in the process of droning terrorists all over the planet and responding to questions about how tough he was with, “ask Bin Ladin.”
This was a tough sell because the President hadn’t bungled anything, had gotten Bin Ladin, had ended Iraq, and had removed the leadership of Libya without losing a single American. By every metric the GOP used under Bush, Obama’s foreign policy was spectacular. The GOP, because they hate the guy irrationally, was making the argument that somehow winning was losing, black was white, up was down, etc.
The reality was the GOP’s election strategy was basically, Obama is black. It wasn’t going to work, and by the time of Benghazi, everyone who was serious about politics should have known it wasn’t going to work. The Rs needed a scandal, something that confirmed their narrative about Obama.
The worst thing you can do in politics is confirm the stereotype. What happened during the fall out of Benghazi is that the GOP felt Obama had confirmed the stereotype, that somehow they could argue he was a bumbling fool and a coward. They jumped all over it with no information. They were gleeful; they were trash talking. They thought they had something. But it was Fools’ Gold.
The GOP is like that guy in the old story who gets punked by his friends with a fake lottery ticket. The guy goes insane, quits his job, and tells his wife he never loved her, tells his friends they are all idiots, and then storms out. When he realizes that the ticket was fake, that it was a joke, his life has been ruined.
That is the GOP on Benghazi. They thought they had a winning ticket but it was a hummer. They looked inept, petty, up past their bed time, and frankly, unpresidential. Romney looked like a joke, again. The GOP looked like liars, because they are. Kelley Ayotte, Lindsey Graham and McCain looked pathetic and paltry in comparison with the President, hell, in comparison with Secretary Clinton. Rand Paul got taken for a ride during her hearing, Rubio kept his head down – announcing to the world that he wasn’t ready for prime time.
Benghazi has been as destructive to the GOP as anything they’ve done in 6 years. But they can’t quit it. They can’t stop. This is their broke back mountain moment, they can’t quit Benghazi, or ObamaCare, or Acorn, or any of a dozen other dead inane issues. Their base won’t let them.
We, as thinking rational actors on the political stage, have an obligation to reject or at least identify this madness. We have an obligation to call out these periodic meltdowns. We have an obligation to acknowledge the hypocrisy and madness of the Right, the crocodile tears of the electeds and the rampant, wholly unbelievable, politics of hate that have dominated the GOP .
The reason the White House has bad answers for Benghazi, and they aren’t that bad, is simple. Ambassador Stevens blew it. The guy on the ground makes the call. Stevens was the Libya expert, he was the Ambassador. He left the compound in Tripoli, traveled light into Benghazi on 9/11. I think there were reasons he went there. I think Chris Stevens, who was an American Hero in every sense of the word, needed to be at the CIA Annex right next to the consulate. I think Ambassador Stevens could have taken more troops. He could have gotten out of Benghazi when it was daylight, though he would have been caught on the road on 9-11.
However, Stevens was the guy making those calls. He didn’t call up the President and say, “hey should I go to Benghazi today?” He didn’t call up Secretary Clinton and ask for permission to travel on 9-11. He was the guy on the ground and the guy making the call, and the guy who it appears screwed up and got people killed. The GOP knows this, but they also know Ds won’t say it; they won’t spit on the grave of an American Hero. It is, like everything else the GOP has done under Obama, reprehensible, devoid of compassion and humanity, almost psychotic in its hatred of the President, and morally bankrupt. It is typical GOP nonsense, and when people like John Dickerson write pieces that entertain this happy horseshit it makes my head explode.
Peace,
J. Christian Watts
Follow me on Twitter @JCWPolitics